Cycling Visionaries Awards - Project Details

BeCycle

BeCycle is a strategy to motivate young people between 12 and 21 years living in Vienna to choose a bike for daily use over other means of transport in order to improve bicycle traffic. The strategy is based on three main pillars: Information, Social Media and Projects.

BeCycle – or how to motivate young people to ride a bike

BeCycle is a strategy to motivate young people between 12 and 21 years living in Vienna to choose a bike for daily use over other means of transport in order to improve bicycle traffic. It is the result of a one-year lasting students-project focusing on different bike-relevant problems.

The strategy is based on an analysis of relevant planning guides, other theme-related strategies and a custom-built online questionnaire, which was sent to youth-associations, students and most of the schools in Vienna.
The aim of the questionnaire was to get a better picture of the target group and to answer questions such as „how often do young people use bikes?”, „what are the reasons not to use a bike on a daily basis?“, „what is the purpose of using a bike?“, „how do parents influence their children when it comes to bike usage?“. In the process, different conclusions were made, which played an essential role in the conceptional design of the strategy mentioned before.
The main conclusion is that there is a potential to motivate the target group in order to use a bike on daily basis. The most common answer to the question “what is the purpose of using a bike?” is “sports” and “private trips” but when it comes to the question, which means of transport the target group uses to get to school or to work the answer is clear: using a bike is not a very common way.
Additionally an important conclusion of the questionnaire was, that there is potential for actions to achieve a better overview in bicycle traffic (like cycle tracks, sign-posting, etc.) or to improve the city bike-station-net, in order to make bicycle-traffic more attractive for young people. Another finding is, that there is a significant influence of traffic-behavior from parents. If the parents of a child use a bike on daily basis it is more likely, that the child uses it too. Based on this finding it was very important for the effectiveness of the strategy to create some projects, which include the parents too.
For the design of the strategy is was very important to know how to reach the target group. Our conclusion is that the process of engaging young people mainly occurs through online and social media. Preliminary research showed that social media is a time and cost efficient way to reach a large part of the relevant target group.

BeCycle is not only a single project to motivate young people to ride a bike, but a whole strategy to spark interest in a certain lifestyle. It is a commitment to an active, modern, fast-paced and environmentally aware lifestyle, that not only makes you fit and healthy but also saves money. With a wide range of different projects BeCycle tries to achieve these goals.
The strategy is based on three pillars (information, social media and projects) which are bundled in a central website. The website contains different types of information, informs about the various projects and cross-links the different social media platforms.


Information
The goal of the information-pillar is to spread interests in the topic, present some interesting and funny facts about cycling by using info graphics, images and short videos. Information also contains findings of recent studies or useful information about bicycle-events or bike-related news. Furthermore a discussion-board is implemented into the website in order to form a platform where people can share their experiences, ideas or simply chat about their passion.

Social Media
Social media channels, such as facebook, twitter and youtube, are used to inform the community about different projects. It also aims to create a space for a community to develop and spread the idea of BeCycle

Projects
A range of projects has been designed to engage young people.

• Competition between different schools
• Facilitation of access to Vienna’s public bicycle-rental-system “City Bike”
• Viral Marketing Sticker to promote the project
• Scavenger hunt by bike